How ICON XR Studios enhanced Jones Soda’s ‘REEL Labels’ programme with WebAR

Jones Soda is a beverage firm recognized for its distinctive flavoured sodas and distinctive packaging. Jones Soda gained reputation due to its unconventional flavours similar to bubblegum, inexperienced apple and watermelon. One of many standout options of Jones Soda is its model, deploying vibrant, quirky and distinctive product packaging to draw prospects. The corporate encourages customers to submit their very own pictures, that are then used as labels on their bottles. This creates a customized and interactive manner for patrons to really feel a part of the model. 

Jones Soda labored with ICON XR Studios (previously August Allen), a Clio award-winning inventive company that works with manufacturers on the chopping fringe of expertise to drive model cut-through. They’re recognized for creating content material that pulls consideration, engages audiences, and converts new prospects, working with manufacturers similar to Rise Broadband, UCHealth and Wana Manufacturers. 

Key Statistics 

The WebAR expertise was included into Jones Soda’s ‘REEL labels’ programme and offered into 22,000+ retail areas within the US and was promoted throughout their web site, and social media channels, with influencers, paid media help, and commerce PR.

The Transient

Jones Soda approached ICON XR Studios to assist them enhance and improve their present ‘REEL Labels’ programme, launched in 2021, with a sooner, seamless person expertise that makes use of WebAR as a substitute of app-based expertise. 

Whereas Jones Soda already included the idea of including customer-submitted pictures to their product packaging via their very own native app utilizing augmented actuality, they wished to make this expertise much more seamless for his or her prospects. Jones Soda wished the expertise to wrap movies across the exterior of a soda can, making it seem that the content material was ‘caught’ to the bottle itself. The content material could be submitted by prospects and followers of the sodas and the model, so Jones Soda wanted a strategy to handle and implement the content material themselves, at scale. 

Goals 

Jones Soda tasked ICON XR Studios with 4 particular targets; 

1. Enhance upon their present custom-driven labels by permitting prospects to entry the content material with out downloading an app 
2. Create an immersive expertise that might be seamlessly launched from the bottle 
3. Allow the staff at Jones Soda to handle the expertise themselves with out costly internet hosting and administration prices 
4. Take the AR expertise past the bottle into media, merchandise & level of sale. 

The Answer 

Utilizing WebAR expertise ICON XR Studios labored intently with Jones Soda to port their present augmented actuality content material from their native app to the cell net. Utilizing WebAR allowed Jones Soda to interact its audience additional and ship a novel, one-of-a-kind expertise with their labels with out customers having to obtain an app.

Jones Soda and ICON XR Studios collaborated to find out the design and implementation of the WebAR expertise. On condition that user-generated content material and storytelling had been already intrinsic to Jones Soda’s model, incorporating these components into the AR transient and total expertise was a basic requirement. This facet was mentioned extensively within the early phases of the inventive course of. ICON XR Studios performed an important function in guiding Jones Soda on the technical capabilities and limitations of AR, which proved invaluable in creating the expertise.

“We have now all the time taken a extremely personalised method with Jones labels,” mentioned Curt Thompson, Director of Advertising and marketing at Jones. “It has included fan-designed artwork, particular label campaigns, and different recent concepts unseen within the beverage trade earlier than us. The brand new expertise ICON XR Studios constructed for Jones takes this concept to the following degree and permits us to have fun our group in video on our packaging, and unlock new methods to share their tales.”

The inspiration of the AR expertise revolved round using the labels on the soda bottles because the canvas. By monitoring and overlaying the AR expertise onto these labels, the purpose was to create an interactive and visually participating encounter. Consequently, the principle goal was to include user-generated movies, seamlessly integrating them into the AR expertise and wrapping them across the can.

Customized back-end 

As a part of the transient, Jones Soda wished the flexibility to add art work and movies themselves, decreasing the burden on third events to deal with content material administration, internet hosting and supply. 

To allow seamless uploads, the undertaking was developed utilizing the Laravel framework and was built-in with a MariaDB database. Which means via ICON XR Studios’ dashboard customers might add photos and movies which had been then processed utilizing Zapworks instruments.

To make sure precision, when a bottle’s QR code is scanned, the system retrieves the particular educated label from the server. This method was adopted to stop Zappar from trying to acknowledge a number of labels concurrently, thereby minimizing potential recognition errors.

“Historically, manufacturers like Jones wanted to depend on third-party distributors and companies to create AR campaigns, and every marketing campaign needed to be created from scratch each time,” mentioned Kristina Veltri, CEO of ICON XR Studios. “Now, Jones can faucet into AR by itself, make adjustments on the fly, check in new communities, and immediately adapt to please and have interaction its audiences.”

Challenges 

All through the creation course of, a few inventive adjustments arose that ICON XR Studios problem-solved with the shopper. 

Picture monitoring vs cloud picture look-up

In probably the most idealistic model of the undertaking, Jones Soda described a model the place a person would level their telephone at a bottle and the AR expertise would robotically launch – that is what’s referred to as cloud-image look-up, and permits for the activation of AR experiences by way of pre-defined imagery inside an present cell app. 

On this occasion, ICON XR Studios suggested picture monitoring expertise by way of WebAR for quite a lot of causes: 

1. Correct UGC content material delivered and tracked per bottle 
2. Cloud-image look-up is barely accessible in cell apps and JS wished WebAR
3. Modest funds – a {custom} cloud-image look-up resolution was too price prohibitive

As well as, right here at Zappar we all the time advise a transparent name to motion when delivering any kind of AR expertise. This ensures the end-user is aware of that augmented actuality content material is on the market on the bottle and why it’s worthwhile to them. 

Cautious planning was important to find out which expertise could be related to every soda flavour, contemplating that the labels assorted for various flavours. This concerned strategizing and assigning applicable AR content material to correspond with particular soda labels, making certain a coherent, correct and tailor-made expertise for every variant.

Total, these issues and changes had been essential to optimize the person expertise and efficiently implement the WebAR on Jones Soda’s packaging.

Expertise 

To create the expertise, the staff at ICON XR Studios used the Zapworks Unity SDK to create the curved floor monitoring aspect whereas creating and updating the user-generated content material inside Zapworks Studio. This ensured that the inventive transient was met, that no app was required to launch the expertise for the shopper, Jones Soda might replace and add movies shared by their prospects and that the inventive and working prices had been stored low. 

Deployment

To launch the expertise, Jones Soda went massive. They put the expertise dwell on merchandise in additional than 22,000 retail areas. This ensured vital publicity in shops across the USA, whereas additionally protecting parity and consistency with their present comms and web site messaging. 

The outcomes

Total Jones Soda had been very pleased with the adjustments made to the present course of and are very completely satisfied that it is a vastly improved undertaking, and total sooner, and cheaper than what we had been utilizing beforehand.

AR has outdated different engagement channels for Jones Soda. The self-serve WebAR platform created for Jones by ICON XR Studios utilizing Zapworks was basic to the success of their ‘REEL Labels’ programme. Jones Soda is now increasing its utilization of Zappar-powered WebAR into posters for PRIDE this yr.